Will Apple’s rumored tablet kick-start e-readers?

In January 2008, after Steve Jobs’ last Macworld keynote, he famously told the New York Times that "people don’t read anymore". He was pooh-poohing Amazon’s Kindle, which had just had its debut, and mused that even the best e-book reader wouldn’t succeed because people’s habits had changed.

According a survey from Flurry, which specializes in smartphone analytics, there were more book-related applications – including books themselves – released for the iPhone in September than games.

But wait, there’s more: In October, 1 in 5 apps released was a book. Flurry’s Peter Farrago speculates on what it means:

The sharp rise in eBook activity on the iPhone indicates that Apple is positioned to take market share from the Amazon Kindle as it did from the Nintendo DS. Despite the smaller form factor of the display, we predict that the iPhone will be a significant player in the book category of the Media & Entertainment space. Further, with Apple working on a larger tablet form factor, running on the iPhone OS, we believe Jeff Bezos and team will face significant competition.

I’ve said in the past that I think Apple’s long-rumored tablet – if it ever really sees the light of day – would best be touted for reading books and periodicals. It would fix a lot of the issues with the Kindle and other, e-Ink-based readers. It would display pages in color and have a touchscreen, which would make reading on it more natural.

Recent news items – none of which come with Apple’s confirmation, of course – have indicated that the company is thinking along these lines. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Apple executives have been hitting up publishers in Australia to provide content for a tablet. And then there’s New York Times Editor Bill Keller’s now-infamous did-he-slip-up-or-was-he-speaking-generically reference to "the impending Apple slate".

(Please, Apple, do not name it the Slate. Or, worse, the iSlate. Thanks much.)

Of course, Apple will promote any iPhone OS-based tablet as a many-splendored thing: It will be able to handle video and music as well as text. I suspect the new iTunes LP format was designed more with the tablet and Apple TV in mind. And, of course, there are games and the 100,000-plus-and-counting apps in the iTunes App Store.

Expectations are that any Apple tablet won’t be cheap, with the latest round of rumors putting it between $700 and $900. That makes the overpriced Kindle, at $259, almost seem like a bargain. And that may be its biggest stumbling point. It’s one thing to spend $199 (and chain oneself to an AT&T service contract) for an iPhone; it’s another to spend almost $1,000 on a device for reading books, watching movies and listening to music.

Although it will immediately appeal to early adopters and those unnaturally attracted to shiny objects, a tablet that pricey isn’t going to get the same kind of mass adoption that the iPhone has had, particularly now that there’s a $99 variant.

What will happen is that the tablet – again, if it ever becomes reality – has the potential to cause a serious disruption in the e-reader universe. And that’s a good thing, because there’s still a lot of innovation left to be done there before it becomes a part of our everyday lives. Apple’s late entry to the party will surely shake things up.